


Little Armadillos

by JackieDaytona



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Childbirth, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Infant Death, Miscarriage, Sexual Harassment, young marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:55:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackieDaytona/pseuds/JackieDaytona
Summary: A look into Nadja's human life. TWs for topics in tags.
Relationships: Laszlo Cravensworth/Nadja, Nadja (What We Do in the Shadows TV)/Original Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Little Armadillos

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written in forever, so forgive the rusty writing skills! Basically just an idea I've been sitting with for a while. For the time and place where Nadja spent her human life, it would have been strange if she WASN'T ever married, so I'm always interested in fics that explore her history. Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> TW for miscarriage, domestic violence/abuse, sexual harassment/violence, teen marriage, abortion, and infant death. Its a real bummer of a story...

Her first miscarriage happened before she even knew she was pregnant. Her periods were never regular. The combination of malnourishment and stress so characteristic of human life in the village made this an impossibility. Most women in her village confirmed a pregnancy once they noticed the uniquely distended stomach or felt the baby kicking, and a few didn’t know for sure until their water broke. So for how small the fetal tissues were when she passed them, after days of cramping and heavy bleeding, she passed it off as a particularly painful menstruation. It wasn’t until her next miscarriage, much further along into that pregnancy, that she realized what must have happened this first time. While stress and malnourishment were likely to blame for the first loss, the second one was undeniably his doing. 

She had known she was pregnant for some time. Being so sick had tipped her off (she remembered her mother feeling this way early on in her pregnancies with her younger siblings), but it was the bodily changes that confirmed her suspicion. The stomach distention was different from that caused by the episodes of excessive hunger that the famines brought on. It was different now, more firm. Hormonally she felt different, too. More protective, more connected. 

He had noticed none of this, and she took great pleasure in that. There was some power in her secret. Finally some part of her body, her life, belonged to her and her alone. The Roma culture is one of community. Whether it is the unending company of your herd of siblings, your husband’s constant control, or just a nosy village elder gossiping about her surprise that a man would ever take you as a wife with an attitude like that, it was so rare for Nadja to have something to herself, something private. She was miserable with the idea of having his baby, but something about knowing this stupid pigshit had already knocked her up while his mother continued to carry on with her fertility rituals felt...powerful. 

That was, of course, until the beating that preceded the miscarriage. Savaric, a village farmer who looked after land nearby, had followed her to the river to proposition her. She was well familiar with this routine from Savaric, she had already been warned about him from three of her older sisters. He had a type, for sure: young, poor, and vulnerable. 

Of course the concern of the older washerwoman who was working downriver from this scene was not for Nadja’s safety, but for Nadja’s loyalty to her husband. Nadja wondered how a woman could become so jaded by time that she could surrender all allegiance to a fellow woman like this. The washerwoman had grown up in this very village, had once been this young and beautiful and vulnerable. Surely she herself had once been in a situation like this, too. Nadja knew for herself, at least, this type of scenario was all too familiar. 

Even after hundreds of years on this Earth, Nadja still finds herself connected to the vulnerability of human youth. She has found so many of her meals this way- a man in a park or at a bar, about to make a predator of himself, that she would instead turn into her prey. She would wipe the memory of the poor woman who had been his intended victim, give her back some peace and innocence that she so strongly craved. How much she wanted to know less ugliness from this world. 

That fidelity she felt to other women was unfortunately not shared by the old washerwoman, who immediately made sure Nadja’s husband (and most of the village) heard a version of the day’s events. Not necessarily the correct version, but a version. After years of marriage, she was well accustomed to his beatings. But this one had been so focused on her stomach that she wondered if he had actually known about the pregnancy, too. Maybe he feared the Savaric exchange was not a one-off event, maybe he suspected the baby was Savaric’s, or some other man who had bedded his wandering wife. Regardless of his intention, she wound up with the familiar cramps and heavy bleeding soon after, this time passing what was undeniably a fetus. They never spoke of this, but she assumed he knew what was happening. While she writhed and moaned in agony, he said nothing to her, only leaving her be. In this marriage, this was a kindness rarely afforded to her. 

It took some time for her to get pregnant again after this (not for his lack of trying, or his mother’s lack of ritualistic practice begging the gods for fertility). This time, however, she carried to term, despite her best efforts. She had tried three separate times to get the right balance of herbs boiled to induce a miscarriage, desperately wanting to be free of this pregnancy. The idea of having a part of this man growing inside her was a violation more disturbing than she could describe, and she certainly was not looking to die in childbirth at the age of 17. However, the concoctions were never strong enough to reach her intended outcome. That is not to say, however, that they were ineffective. 

After nearly 30 hours of labor with the support of the village midwives, she gave birth to a tiny baby girl, who would never take a single breath on this Earth. The midwives mistook Nadja’s sobs as the agony of loss, when the reality was that the woman was sobbing in relief. How grateful she felt that her daughter would never have to know the pain of womanhood, the danger of entering this world in a woman’s body. She returned to her husband empty handed, and was unsurprisingly punished for it accordingly. 

While most of the guidance for ensuring a healthy pregnancy at the time centered on the correct offerings and rituals, she figured he must have made some connection between his abuse and their misfortune with reproduction, because the next time she became pregnant, he more or less kept his hands off of her. And yet, even with the better marital conditions, she found herself more hopeless and exhausted than ever before. There was the physical exhaustion that came with the pregnancies, and of course the general malaise that consistent malnourishment brought along, but this was different. She no longer had the energy to experiment with abortifacients, not really caring if she did die in childbirth, or of pregnancy complications along the way. 

After 18 hours in the village birthing tent, she left with a tiny, delicate baby boy. At some point during those 18 hours, her resolve had changed completely. Motivated in a way she hadn't been in months, the only thing Nadja could think about was protecting and caring for her son. 

The babies always come out looking like their fathers, they say. But this baby was all hers. He had thick, dark hair growing in, more similar to the texture of her and her siblings than the child’s father and his nieces and nephews. The child’s soft cries reminded her of how a few of her younger siblings had sounded when they were so new to this world. The child’s sireship felt irrelevant; this was her baby, her blood. 

She was satisfied with having a son. She knew this would please her husband and his family, a son being the desired outcome of a pregnancy in their village. Someone who could grow to be strong, carry on the family. Women were married off to other families as soon as they could be. A son, however, was a way to secure a lineage. Hopefully, she thought, this success would keep him off of her, at least for a little while. 

But her husband’s temper returned as soon as Nadja and the infant did. He had no patience for the baby’s cries, Nadja often punished for the child’s volume or late-night disturbances. A small price to pay, she felt, for her child’s safety. She could take the brunt of the violence, and keep the attention off of her son. 

She had been trying to do just this the night it happened. He was inconsolable; not hungry, not tired, not too cold, not too warm. Simply upset, in the way young infants sometimes are. It was not the crying or the lack of sleep that was biting at her anxiety, but the knowledge that every cry was another grain of sand passing through the hourglass of her husband’s patience. She knew his abuse was coming soon, and needed the child to be content enough to put down before then. This was the only way to focus back her husband’s anger onto her, and off of the child. 

No matter what old trick of her mother’s she tried to sooth the infant back to sleep, she was unsuccessful. As the last grain of sand passed through the hourglass, she could feel her husband approach. She did all she could to try and protect the child from the shaking, and paid her own price for these efforts. When she regained consciousness hours later, the silence her husband had so desired had finally been achieved. 

Infant mortality was so common in the village that most never even bothered to ask what had happened to the boy. He was buried out in the fields, next to his sister. This spot became Nadja’s main connection to the island for years after her human death. Long after she was banished from the village for her unholy transformation, after she had killed that pigshit of a husband in the most painful way she could conjure up, even long after any of the family she had known and loved in her human life had grown old and died, she still snuck back in the nights to visit the final resting place of her children. It wasn’t until the mass fires that plagued the island in the late sixteenth century, when the area became unrecognizable and the exact burial location impossible to find, that she felt untethered enough to explore further west into Europe, eventually finding herself in London, particularly drawn to one tiny, leprosy-and-plague-infested village. 

The camera pans over the collection of taxidermied animals lining the walls of the crypt. She directs them over to the small armadillo mounted in the top corner, a special member of their collection. 

Something about it always stood out to her. Small, adorable, yet so tough. Something that could keep safe in such a dangerous world. Of course, it did eventually land among the couple’s collection of taxidermy, but that was after a full life and a death of old age. 

The couple had actually taken in the armadillo about a century ago, as a pet. The other animals in their collection served as reminders of Laszlo’s strength, his ability to protect and defend Nadja; the owl that had scratched her, the goat she so hated. Their armadillo, however, served as a reminder of how nurturing he could be; a gentle caregiver, a supportive partner. The couple had taken in the pet together, caring for it for over a decade before its passing. Nadja had the animal stuffed immediately, wanting to know where her little armadillo was at all times. Dead like her, safe from the dangers of life, and always under her watch and protection. 

“If me and Laszlo were to have ever had a child,” she tells the documentary crew, “I like to imagine it would look like him.” She looks admiringly at the creature as the cameraman zooms in on its case. “Small and hard”.


End file.
